The HOPEFUL TRAVELLER Page 16

  ‘It’s rather like one imagines those awful civil service weekends,’ Adam remarked. ‘Being weighed up to see whether one is the right type.’

  ‘Perhaps they are just curious because we are different,’ John suggested.

  ‘No.’ Adam shook his head. ‘The Welsh are a gregarious folk; it doesn’t worry them if other people are different, they are sorry for them for not being Welsh, but they’re not in the least censorious.’

  ‘How do you account for it, then?’

  ‘We have a part to play and we’re not playing it properly.’

  ‘You’re making a lots of drama out of nothing at all,’ John told him. ‘You should be writing books, not publishing them.’

  The next day Kerren and John were so stiff that they could hardly walk upright and they insisted on more gentle exercise. So they walked in the Usk valley. The weather was fine and it was very peaceful; they had almost forgotten the purpose of their journey to Wales when they returned to the inn. Adam went to find the innkeeper. They were leaving early the next morning and wanted to settle the bill that night. As he stood waiting for the man to return, the old woman sidled up to him.

  ‘Give me the car keys, then.’

  ‘The car keys?’ He was taken aback, wondering whether he had heard her aright.

  She sucked her breath in between the bare gums and her mouth disappeared in a pucker of irritation.

  ‘All right,’ he said, intrigued.

  He handed her the keys and she shuffled off, her hunched shoulders twitching in a way that expressed clearly the fact that she did not suffer fools gladly. Adam wanted to follow her, but the innkeeper had returned and he made such a laborious business of the settlement that by the time Adam reached the yard, both the old woman and the car had gone.

  ‘You must have been mad to give her the keys,’ John said indignantly.

  ‘The car will be back soon,’ Adam said. ‘Whatever these people are up to, they’re not stealing cars.’

  He was proved right. The car was there in the yard in the morning. The innkeeper, uncharacteristically, insisted on carrying their cases for them.

  ‘We’ll have them in the boot,’ John said as the man opened the rear door of the car.

  The man gave him a bleak look and then turned to Adam with a shrug of his shoulders, his manner making it clear that this was the only intelligent member of the party.

  ‘Cases’ll have to go in here.’ He piled the cases to one side, shut the door and handed the car keys to Adam. The old woman had appeared. She said to Adam:

  ‘You’ll be coming again?’

  ‘I hope so. You’ve made us so welcome.’

  This sardonic reply appeared to please her greatly; she cackled and wagged her head up and down. As the car drew away Kerren said, looking back, ‘You’ve made a hit with her. She’s repeating that hilarious remark of yours to her son. It will be all over the village tonight.’

  Adam drove until they reached a quiet lane well away from the main road. Then he stopped the car and they all got out. A breeze was blowing down from the Welsh hills, soft and caressing with a hint of rain; it was very quiet, just the rustle of the trees and the distant sound of a sheepdog issuing his staccato orders. Kerren felt, as one can sometimes in strange places that are free of past association and future commitment, that this was a timeless moment. Something of the same feeling came to the other two, a feeling of release, a gay, irresponsible, heady sense of freedom. Kerren looked at Adam, his hair blown in the wind, smiling to himself as he bent over the boot, and she thought that he had shed years on this week-end. At his side, John was holding his breath as though he expected the crown jewels. Adam, Kerren decided, would make the better highwayman of the two; he was not entirely committed to law and order. Then her own curiosity overcame her and she said, ‘Hurry, Adam, hurry!’

  ‘I can’t get the hang of this,’ he muttered.

  ‘You’re over eager for the loot,’ John retorted.

  Adam turned the key in the lock again, more slowly this time; something moved beneath his fingers and the boot was open. Neatly packed inside was a whole side of bacon, four packing cases which they could tell at a glance contained eggs, and several neat stacks of butter. They stood in a semi-circle gravely examining this array, and John absently picked up a packet of butter as though testing its solidity. Adam said to Kerren, ‘So much for your poor hill farm that couldn’t spare half-a-dozen eggs!’ The mundane nature of their cargo brought them down to earth. Adam shut the boot and they went back to the car.

  ‘It was the simple answer, of course,’ Adam said.

  ‘And the machinery we delivered?’ John asked.

  ‘Something to fool us, plus money in payment.’

  ‘And what do we do about it?’

  ‘I suppose we deliver it. Unless you propose to consume it all yourself?’

  They were resentful at being used in this way; resentful, too, that Captain Cartwright had turned out to be nothing more than a small-time operator in the black market. John looked out of the window at the green, rolling country falling away behind them. His face burnt as he remembered how he had described his war-time comrade . . . a man who could carry his load . . . He sank down in his seat, squirming at his own pretentiousness and a little shocked to realize that he would have found it easier to forgive Captain Cartwright had the contents of the boot been the spoils of a daring robbery.

  They were driving along a narrow lane with a reservoir on one side and a plantation of conifers on the other. They passed a rack with long sticks hanging from it, and Kerren asked listlessly, ‘What are those?’ Adam said, ‘Firebeaters.’ Apart from this brief exchange, they did not speak for twenty minutes. Then John asked crisply:

  ‘How does this thing operate?’

  ‘The food goes to a lot of nasty little cafes in Soho,’ Kerren snapped.

  ‘Don’t you believe it!’ Adam retorted. ‘It goes to a lot of eminently respectable pillars of the community. Decent little grocers who are the backbone of the nation.’

  John said, ‘Not this consignment.’

  Adam glanced at him in the driver’s mirror and Kerren swivelled round in her seat to get a good look at his face. He appeared to have recovered his good humour and was sitting back, relaxed and at peace with life. He said, ‘Know of any deserving cases?’

  Adam exploded, ‘Do you know just how much we’ve got in that boot?’

  ‘Quite a lot. We’ll have to make a list. It will take a bit of thinking about, but then we’ve got a long journey ahead.’

  ‘But he’s paid for it,’ Kerren pointed out.

  ‘Too bad. He took a risk and it didn’t come off.’

  This seemed fair enough. Adam said, ‘And where do we store it in the meantime?’

  ‘In your flat, of course. We don’t want to involve anyone else, and your flat is the only one that is self-contained.’

  Adam said, ‘I think there’s a flaw in that argument.’

  While he was working it out, Kerren and John began to make a list. Kerren said, ‘Jan is having the side of bacon, he’s a deserving case if ever there was one. We owe a debt to the refugees.’

  ‘I should have thought they owed a debt to us,’ John protested.

  ‘Then that’s where you’re wrong. They’ve lost their country. What have you lost?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a very logical argument.’

  ‘And Jan works very hard.’

  ‘Bully for Jan!’ Adam intervened. ‘Put him down on the list John.’

  At this point, the road took a sharp turn. Another car was coming in the opposite direction, driven as local cars are, down the middle of the road. Adam pulled hard on the wheel. There was a muddy field ahead, the entrance barred by an inadequate gate which the Rover swept majestically aside. The wheels sank into the mud with a slow, luxurious abandon. The other car braked and by the time the occupants of the Rover had sorted themselves out, a uniformed figure was bending down to look at them.

  �
��Driving fast, weren’t you?’ The lilting voice did not entirely conceal the fact that the constable had decided that attack is the best form of defence. Adam wound down the window.

  ‘I’m afraid that I’m not familiar with these roads,’ he said meekly.

  The constable stared at them and they stared back at him. Kerren noticed that Adam’s hands were shaking. The constable noticed it, too, and said tenderly:

  ‘Given you a bit of a shock, has it?’

  Adam said, ‘I’ll smoke a cigarette before we get her out if you don’t mind.’

  The constable walked to the front of the car and ruminated for a moment or two.

  ‘I don’t know that you’ll be able to get her out,’ he said eventually.

  Adam said, ‘I think we’ll manage, if you’ll give us a hand.’

  ‘The lanes are very narrow, aren’t they?’ John said. ‘Not much room for passing,’ He turned his head and looked in the direction of the police car, well across its station.

  The constable gnawed his lip. The driver was now approaching, his expression a mixture of truculence and anxiety. His companion said, ‘Maybe we can give them a hand, eh, Davy?’

  Meanwhile the farmer was advancing across the field, a collie snapping at his heels. He roared threats about the gate and damage to his crops, but the constable intervened:

  ‘Off its hinges that gate has been all summer, and well you know it. Matt Griffiths. And as for damage to the crops, what crops are you supposed to be growing in this quagmire?’

  Kerren got out of the car. That same gentle breeze was blowing down from the hills, soft and caressing as ever; it did not seem to have the same therapeutic effect. The driver, leaving his mate to dispose of the farmer, said:

  ‘We’ll need those cases out, sir. And any you’ve got in the boot.’

  Adam said, ‘I think we can probably manage if we take the cases out.’

  John said, ‘We’ve just got a picnic hamper in the boot and a table.’

  ‘Table?’ the man repeated, and Adam said austerely: ‘I insist on eating food on a table.’

  ‘He carried it all the way up the Beacons on his back,’ Kerren said.

  The men were beginning to form around the car, the two constables on one side and John, the farmer and his dog on the other. The dog was a hindrance because he would snap at John’s ankles whenever he moved. Adam put the gear lever into reverse and they all pushed; their faces grew crimson, the veins stood out like cords on their foreheads, their eyes protruded. The car remained quite still. Kerren could not bear it. She turned and went into the lane where she walked up and down until a great hail told her that the car was released. It backed out slowly, mud-spattered and with rusty clawmarks on the bonnet and side panel as though it had met with a Welsh dragon instead of a Welsh gate. Captain Cartwright had a lot of shocks awaiting him.

  Kerren was anxious to get away as soon as possible, but none of the men appeared to recognize any need for haste. Adam clambered out and offered cigarettes all round. Then the farmer was given something for his gate and the policemen were offered, and accepted, the price of a couple of pints. The dog got nothing and expressed his disapproval by lifting his leg against the open rear door. At last the party broke up. The policemen and the farmer stood in the road and waved them off, and the dog made a half¬hearted gesture of chasing the car.

  As they rounded the bend and lost sight of their farewell party, Adam said, ‘That settles it! We’ll unload all this stuff at Jan’s restaurant. I don’t know anything about him, but I’ll take his worthiness on trust. I only hope he’s discreet as well!’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Robin followed Kerren’s lead in escaping from the victory celebrations.

  ‘It’s all the hypocrisy that I can’t stomach,’ she told Clyde. ‘If the Germans had dropped the atom bomb we would have raised the most awful howl about man’s inhumanity to man; but we have to do it to the accompaniment of a lot of sanctimonious mumbo- jumbo about shortening the war and saving thousands of lives. Almost, the world has to be grateful to us – even the Japanese!’

  Her dislike of hypocrisy did not, however, prevent her arranging to stay with her new friend Meriel at Wincanton and making plans to meet Jan there.

  ‘You’ll enjoy your jamboree much more without me making faces in the wings,’ she told Clyde.

  There was an element of truth in this. He was afraid that she might cause offence by her airily contemptuous manner.

  Robin insisted on taking Terence with her. His presence eased her conscience, at least she was not deserting her child. The time passed pleasantly enough on the Saturday. She had explained a little about Jan to Meriel who accepted the situation readily. Meriel did not approve of what Robin was doing, but she welcomed the excitement the intrigue provided in her otherwise humdrum existence.

  Jan was coming on Sunday afternoon. He was to stay the night in a local hotel, although other arrangements could be made, Meriel had hinted. He would return to London on Monday.

  ‘He can’t be away from the restaurant for long,’ Robin explained to Meriel. ‘He takes it very seriously.’ She spoke as though it was a hobby that Jan had taken up.

  ‘At least he gets away sometimes,’ Meriel said. ‘A farmer works from dawn to sunset and then talks farming all the evening.’

  ‘How do you bear it?’

  ‘The nights are good.’

  Robin hoped that some comparable confidence was not expected of her.

  On Sunday morning Robin and Meriel took Terence out. The countryside was at its best, barley fields brushed with scarlet poppies, grass and buttercups knee high in the meadows. The breeze was gentle. Robin thought it was a pity life was not always like this, unhurried and without stress. Her whole life had been an attempt to escape and now she was beginning to see that the escape would never be effected. You escaped from town to country and then, as Meriel bore witness, the country became your trap. You escaped to a man; he opened his arms and the moment they closed around you, you were trapped. You had to learn to live in the trap.

  She began to have misgivings about Jan. She had taken a bold step by suggesting that Jan should meet her here. Hitherto, she had allowed herself to be borne along on the tide of other people’s desires, never setting the course herself. But this was entirely her doing. She supposed that in the circumstances she could not refuse Jan anything that he demanded. She began to feel very cheap and imagined that he would use her with brutal contempt. Meriel, who did not want to be cheated of her little drama, prescribed stomach powder and said, ‘You must see him. It’s too late to back out.’

  In fact, Robin need not have been afraid of the consequences. She and Jan walked in the afternoon and had a meal at his hotel in the evening. It was all very chaste, their behaviour was sedate and their conversation stilted. Jan was wearing the same dark blue demob, suit which was not at all appropriate for country walks. He seemed to have grown taller and more angular since she last saw him. His manner was solemn. All in all, he reminded her of a latter-day Abraham Lincoln as he strode through the country lanes, an ungainly figure with his raw-boned wrists protruding too far from the cuffs of his jacket. His refusal to stay the night at the farm, however, was pure Jugoslavian, all flashing eyes and wounded honour. His pride was something she would never understand.

  At dinner he watched her with a sombre, brooding intensity which she found unnerving. She talked brightly, but could see that he was not listening; his eyes were on his plate most of the time, but every so often he would glance up as though stealing a look at a forbidden picture. After the meal, he suggested that they should go to his room; he said that he had a bottle of wine which was better than the wine which the hotel would produce. After so recently attacking his honour, Robin thought it wise to accept this excuse at its face value. When they reached the room, he offered her a chair by the window and then rummaged at the back of the wardrobe, finally producing a bottle of red wine. There was a bakelite tooth mug and a glass on the shelf abov
e the wash basin; Jan drank from the tooth mug and Robin had the glass. She was becoming increasingly apprehensive, but was determined to see the evening through. She drank the wine slowly, but even so her glass was replenished too often. She looked at Jan. How different he was from the other men she knew, with his sunken eyes, his harsh, ridged cheekbones, his flashes of incomprehensible gaiety and his equally incomprehensible touchiness. She noticed suddenly that he had a gold tooth; this seemed, more than any other factor, more even than the long, angular body with its sinewy strength, to set the seal on his strangeness, his uncouth, alien savagery. She longed to be at home with Clyde who, if he was nothing else, was a considerate lover. She eased back in her chair and looked out of the window. There was a field at the back, then another field, then another, no houses, no roads, not even a meandering country lane. It was all intensely solitary. The sun was going down in a ball of fire and its red-gold glow seemed to engulf her. Jan put his glass down and rose to his feet. Now it would begin.

  He came and stood over her, staring down at her with those piercing eyes. His fingers touched her throat and she tilted her head back feeling like a sacrificial maiden being prepared for her god. She was wearing a thin, shantung blouse, nothing beneath it. He unbuttoned the blouse and drew it back from her shoulders; she rested her head against the window frame and closed her eyes. She felt the evening air against her breasts and waited for his less delicate exploration. Nothing happened. A great deal of time seemed to go by. After a while, she began to feel rather silly. She opened her eyes. Jan was sitting on the edge of the bed, so much in shadow that she could not see his face properly; he was sitting upright and seemed to be staring at her. She tried to speak, but it was not a situation in which words came easily. She felt cold and quite ridiculous, like the heroine of a film caught for ever in a ludicrous posture when the equipment breaks down. She said in a bright, social voice, ‘I shall have to go soon.’ But she could not bring herself to button up her blouse; if she stayed all night, she could not button up her blouse. It would be too absurd, like dressing after a medical examination. Jan got up. He came to her slowly. Her heart beat so hard against her ribs that she thought she would faint; but she was mad to be delivered of this awful inactivity, she did not mind how violent he was, indeed for the first time in her life she positively craved violence. He drew her to her feet and the blouse slipped to her waist. She felt his hands on her hips; her body jerked uncontrollably and he said, ‘It’s all right.’ But she did not want to be soothed, she was in an agony of impatience for him to release her skirt. Instead, he drew the blouse gently around her shoulders, as though he was veiling a piece of sculpture, and began to do up the buttons. She was still in that film, only this time a reel had been missed out. She whispered, ‘Don’t you want . . .?’